The East Side Freedom Library, the University of Minnesota Press, and the University of Minnesota History Department invite you to a special book event, honoring our mentor and friend, the late Professor Hy Berman

Professor Berman: The Last Lecture of Minnesota’s Greatest Public Historian

A Conversation with Jay Weiner

Monday, November 25, 2019, 7pm

Hy Berman (1925–2015) was the face of public history in Minnesota for many decades—a peerless political observer and labor historian, popular lecturer and university professor, and familiar presence on the Twin Cities PBS show Almanac. In Professor Berman: The Last Lecture of Minnesota’s Greatest Public Historian, readers encounter the Hy Berman audiences and students loved, telling stories as only he could—stories that are at once a close-up view of Minnesota history and a conversational self-portrait of a man who often found himself in the middle of that history even as it was unfolding.  

Featuring an all-star cast of the state’s politicians (from Humphrey to Rudy Perpich, Harold Stassen, Arne Carlson, and Jesse Ventura) and full of engaging, often surprising anecdotes, Berman’s “last lecture” describes a rich life devoted to teaching that reached far beyond the classroom—and that found the professor translating history for an avid TV audience, helping to appoint the state’s first female Supreme Court justice, and testifying at Minnesota’s landmark tobacco trial. Edited and with an Introduction and Afterword by long-time Twin Cities journalist Jay Weiner, Hy Berman’s final lecture is a strong and powerful contribution to Minnesota’s story. Books will be available for purchase.

The East Side Freedom Library is honored to be the home for many of Professor Berman’s books, thanks to the generosity of his children, Ruth and Stephen. These books bear witness to the breadth and depth of his interests and his thinking, ranging over the course of his career and including a number of doctoral dissertations written by his students.

Jay Weiner, the editor of Professor Berman, is author of Stadium Games: Fifty Years of Big League Greed and Bush League Boondoggles and This Is Not Florida: How Al Franken Won the Minnesota Senate Recount, both published by the University of Minnesota Press.

Click “Going” and share on Facebook
Free and open to all